Peer to Peer to the Rescue

During the late 90's and early this decade, after the Napster rise and fall, Peer to Peer (or p2p for short) took on a bad name. It was associated with piracy, and many people dismissed it as a legitimate business tool. In the past few years, that has begun to change - mainly with the rise of Bit Torrent - a file sharing technology that is known for its ability to deliver tremendously high speeds by sharing the burden of uploading. While many of you know how p2p works - users share information with each other instead of getting it from a central server - I'm not sure if people understand the huge savings and efficiency it produces.

With even three peers on a network - one that has the file and two that want it - download speeds can be doubled. If everyone can share files at 100KB/s, then normal downloading would split that speed for each of the other two peers, limiting them to 50KB/s each. With p2p, the first user downloads part A at 50KB/s and user 2 downloads part B at 50KB/s. Once they are done, user 1 downloads part B from the server at 50KB/s and from user 2 (which just got it from the server) at 100KB/s - tripling the download speed to 150KB/s.

Now, that's a very simplified (and confusing) version of what p2p does - for more in depth explanations, check out Wikipedia's explanation of how Bit Torrent works. If you haven't heard of it yet, your internet provider has. Bit Torrent currently accounts for as much as 55% of the upload bandwidth used today. For radio stations, what all this technical jargon means is that it is possible to use p2p to make a large reduction in bandwidth costs.

Instead of paying for the bandwidth of every bit a user hears, stations only pay to get that audio to a few listeners, who then pass it along to fellow listeners themselves. Now stations can use the unused bandwidth that people pay their cable company or DSL provider for and use it to send more listeners audio - at no bandwidth cost to them. To do so, however, takes technology. The traditional point to point streaming technology is fairly simple. To stream your audio in a p2p fashion would require that software gets installed on your listener's computer and that it has quality checks to make sure each listener is actually getting the audio they need to listen.

That's where companies like Abacast come in. I talked to their President, Michael King about p2p streaming, it's acceptance in the market place, its effect on bandwidth costs and what tools they have developed to take advantage of it. That's all in next week's The Net Untangled. Until then, feel free to poke around their site and see more on what I was talking about.

As always, AllAccess has my "The Net Untangled Tip of the Day" each weekday and a column on Website Wednesdays. So check back and together we'll get our internet presence focused on keeping radio strong in this world of increasing competition.

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